My father was a lazy, callous and stingy man who did nothing to expand our noble house's wealth apart from taxing the peasants below us 'til they were nearly destitute, and since he spared me no love in life, my soul didn't even feel a drop of pity when he finally died. Oh, of course, I pretended to be terribly cut up about it, but honestly, I couldn't have been happier when that old codge finally kicked the bucket. I'd finally inherited the family fortune, the ancient title of Baron Grey of Oxfordshire and the beautiful Victorian manor that he'd bought but never moved into, probably because he was drunk when he signed the deed and didn't remember that he'd owned it, although I'm glad he didn't ruin the place with his damned presence - it would have been a real shame if he did. Oh, that ancient mansion... it was a wide, gorgeous beast of red bricks and had tall, ornamental steeples that lined its sloped roof. The only thing that marred its perfection was the thick, untamed forest of gnarled pines that lay behind it, which for some strange reason no tenant had decided to chop down. Ah, yes, my days would've been spent in comfort for the rest of my life in that place! I could've married a girl, had a few children and forget everything else in the world in that gorgeous home that was all mine to keep foreve - 

"What the bloody hell do you mean, 'eminent domain'?!" I exploded at my lawyer as I slammed a burning hot fist down on his desk. "The manor is miles away from anything remotely resembling a city! How would His Majesty benefit from seizing it?"

"Calm down, Mr Grey," he replied, his grey eyes barely twitching from the document detailing the King's theft from me, densely littered with black, unintelligible words. "I'll get this all figured out for you, sir. There's no reason to panic about this, not until I figure out what's happened."

I scoffed. "You don't seem to panic about anything, do you, Mr Latimer?"

 A warm smile from the thin, old man - his bony and ancient face made it somehow feel sharp. "Knights don't panic, sir. Call me Ross." We sat in silence for a while, his grin still on his face as he scanned the page, until he apparently came to a rather irksome paragraph, put on some glasses, frowned, then looked up at me with concern plastered on his face. "Actually, sir... I think it might be a better idea if we don't dispute this order."

"What?"

"No, sir, you see, " he held up the document, pointing to one of the hundreds of tiny lines as I clenched my fists, "the manor has been marked eminent domain because it has been deemed dangerous and for good reason." I leaned across the desk to try and make out the words he had his finger to:

His Majesty, King Henry XV, while fully appreciating the rights and honours of the noble House Grey of Oxfordshire, must seize the property, due to a number of increasingly concerning suicide cases, totalling in three deaths consecutively for the previous tenants.

I felt my fists loosen as my rage evaporated, only to be replaced with utter confusion as I squinted at the letters. "Suicide cases...? Ok, a little unusual, but there's nothing wrong about the property itself, just the owners - "

All three previous tenants have died as a result of asphyxiation by hanging themselves from a random tree in the forest behind the property, the most recent death holding a suicide note that had been instructed to be given to the next owner of the property who was the previous Earl Grey of Oxfordshire, which now lies in the possession of the current Earl, accorded by his father's final will and testament to pass forth all his property to his son.

My eyebrows furrowed. "That's... hm. That can't be a coincidence. Died in the exact same place, in the exact same way?"

Ross nodded grimly as he took the paper from my gaze, putting it neatly in a thin, grey folder on one side of his desk. "Each with a suicide note, no less. If you wish, sir, I can easily retrieve this property for you. It's unlikely that the King and his men will want to keep such a black spot. I can easily just say we'll investigate the deaths instead."

Right. Great. Fantastic. I was getting the property back. "Okay."

"Okay! I'll look into that for you sir, thank you very much and good afternoon!" The man beamed at me and took off his glasses, kicking back in his swivel chair and whipping out the Evening Gazette's latest issue from seemingly nowhere.

I was slightly dumbfounded by this man's decision to pretty much brush me off, then I decided to just cross my legs and stay in the same spot for a little while until he noticed. How long it would take this ex-warrior to see me?

At some point at which I had stopped thinking, Ross finally lowered his paper, glanced at the clock on the wall, then at me, then back at the clock and then back to me, but this time with an eyebrow raised. "Mr Grey, I have been staring at this same page for five minutes. You continue to sit in that chair. Is there anything I can help you with?"

"I believe you have those suicide notes somewhere, Ross."

"I don't deny it, Mr Grey, I probably do. They're probably in a sealed envelope and I'm probably meant to give it to you along with the property deed."

"May I have them, please?"

Ross suddenly looked a bit uneasy. "Of course, Mr Grey, if you so wish, but, um..." he turned towards a horrid, tall heap of loose sheets and paperwork, threatening to fall over from its own sheer mass and density, on the other side of his desk from the neat little folder. "I may have lost them. It'll take a while, Mr Grey, a very long while."

Despite myself, a grin spread across my face. "I have all day, sir. Call me Arthur."

----------------------------------------

Ross was a kind man, so even though I had to wait around twenty minutes in my car for him to hand me the envelope of notes, I didn't mind as much as I otherwise would have. So I took the notes, bid Ross goodbye and told my driver to take me to the Grey Mansion, my family's home, all with a surprisingly light mood. However, it was killed almost immediately after when I opened the envelope and began to read one of the notes, and it was replaced with this strange... implosion, like I could feel my soul collapsing in on itself, scrunching up smaller and smaller with every word. Every word...

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

OXFORDSHIRE CONSTABULARY CASE DOCUMENT - RE: SUICIDE OF MR. JAMES PHILLIP.

FOUND ON DECEMBER 21ST, 1968. NOTE CARRIED ON THE CORPSE OF THE VICTIM, CONFIRMED SUICIDE BY FORENSIC EXPERTS. TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

What I am about to tell you should not, for the love of all good men and any kind God, ever be repeated to fleshy mortal ears to hear, nor copied out for their thin, watery eyes to read, lest they suffer the same painful fate that I am certain I have felt by now; the calm, slow release of death, brought to me by a kind rope that squeezed out my useless breath and tied by my own hands. You may think me a coward for deserting all I once had in a luxurious life, full of excess and waste, but I tell you, any other poor fool who had seen the things I did would have snapped his own neck out of kind mercy. I warn you now, for the final time, that if you read this note and are not careful, you may find yourself seeing one of them and follow me. This fleeting moment is the last to save yourself.

By the grace of my father's young death in the forest behind the manor, I am a wealthy man - even as I feverishly scribble, there is a night of wine and earthly desire prepared for me at my manor, although I shan't see it again. I will, however, miss it sorely, for I spent a thousand nights squandering my fortune with those passions, 'til one night, this night, I was suddenly stricken with guilt on the money my father had wasted away to earn that I had spent on my own disgusting comforts, which I had occasionally been hit by before. Each time that guilt struck, I felt a strange attraction to that dark forest, but fear, the most benevolent of all emotions, kept me from that great expanse of evil pines, until tonight. For a strong draught of some drink had killed my fear and turned me into a brazen fool. A fool to be enlightened of the most horrible things, in the most terrible way.

I slipped out of my manor at sunset. I would've brought I steed, but I was too drunk to ride - rather, all I brought was a lamp to light the way. I trudged up the path to the woods, my light making the gravel beneath e flicker with the flame, m giddiness silencing the cracking weight of my footsteps on the path. I could barely feel my own limbs as I stumbled into that forbidden place, weightless, like floating on the wind. And while it should've only taken less than a minute to get to the forest, it felt like hours. At the time, I thought the drink-addled mind made my legs meander, but now I am certain it was a kind warning from the good elements of nature, a final attempt to make me turn back, but alas! It failed. The drink brought me through the path into those woods, and by the time I was sober, I had gone far too deep in them to ever return.

For when I sobered, I found myself miles from any human light or smoke - there wasn't the slightest indication of civilisation anywhere nearby. I must have been in the centre of the forest, and I would need to get out. So I hefted my lamp in search of a path out, but the feeble light revealed near nothing; I stumbled about a small patch of trees in what seemed to be a circle, the yellow glow only creating the dimmest, weakest attempt at fighting the oily darkness of the night. My thoughts began to wander in madness. The night... the slick blackness that permeates all the universe. What if you could contain it, I thought, and burn it like the oil of a lamp? Would it glow endlessly, or just spread more darkness instead? I eventually dismissed these as stupid, childish questions, but the moment I did, my lamp light passed an ancient, leafless and rotting tree, from which within a hollow came a foul stench of old, stale dust. When I brought the light closer to the husk, it revealed within it a strange oddity: a tiny, sealed vial, no bigger than my thumb, filled with a strange yet beautiful misty black concoction, with currents of grey cascading through it like clouds drifting and curling through the sky. I was certain that this was exactly what my mind had wandered into - the night itself, stoppered and contained, ready to be burnt away.

In foolish, yet horrified curiosity, I reached for the vial, and from my clammy clasp, it slipped to the hard dirt ground, and the glass was chipped.

The night within trickled from the cracks - no, it spilt - no, it poured! It had fit in the palm of my hand a second ago, and now it had flooded the world, night above merged with night below, the stars being swallowed by grey mist, the rustle of the trees in the cold and biting wind vanishing, all things boiling hotly as they became that graceful, evil steam, their forms evaporating into it - Oh God! - it all boiled away, turning into that grey essence of all, sparing nothing, not even my own dreary body! I felt myself being pulled away like I was being unwound into strings, turning to dust, then to mist, then to -

To them.

Churning current brought all the mist together, and I saw the things it wove to form. I do not know what they are, but at the very least they are gods. Things of powers so extravagant, so beyond the small mind of the buffoonish, infantile apes called humans, that only their shadows can be seen with mortal eyes, and only the outlines of those shadows can be seen without going insane. Unfortunately, I did not only see the outline but much more. I suppose I'm one of the mad ones now.

I will not recount what I saw. It is too horrible for words. But know this. I did not only see the gods, but I was also woven into them as mist, just like all other things. All I can describe the feeling of being part of one is... overwhelming. Far too much for any man to handle. I saw visions of the stars being pulled by puppet masters behind the black stage of the cosmos, I felt human history crawling up me like an ant up my skin, I could feel the passage of time pumping through me, eroding away lives as it did so and spreading the bits across my body, giving me existence... it was wrong, and right, and evil and good and so much more. It was too much. Nothing can be the same anymore, not after that. So I am ending it, and leaving this note here as a warning.

Do not go into the woods, no matter how much it calls you. The vial is still out there, and now that it has been cracked, only a little push is needed to break it completely, and when it is broken, all hell will break loose, in a wave of suicidal ecstasy.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

My eyebrows were furrowed, as my mind raced in deep thought. If the black vial was real (and it certainly seemed that way - all the other notes mentioned it as well), it was pretty obviously a major thing in the forest. But I didn't think it was actually dangerous - it was probably just a few bottles of ink that someone had thrown out in there or something and the others had simply gone mad in the forest. But there was something that was bothering me - no-one had actually described any of their hallucinations, only saying vague things about "ancient evils" and "deities from the beyond", and from my personal experience with drug-addled peasant idiots who'd stumbled into my halls, they couldn't bloody shut up for half a second about the stuff they were seeing. That didn't seem right.to me. So it was after great consideration, and with great uncertainty, that during that ride across the well-worn roads of the countryside of Oxfordshire, that I would ask my driver for the carphone and call up my lawyer.

"Hello, Ross? Yes, it's me, Arthur Grey. Thanks for the notes you gave me. D'you mind telling me any legal repercussions I may face from burning down the forest behind the manor?"